American Jews feel pain of Hamas attack on Israel
Saturday's terror attack was the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust
WASHINGTON — At a morning playdate for children attending a Jewish preschool in upper northwest Washington, D.C., parents munched on bagels and sipped coffee from Call Your Mother, the popular local “Jew-ish” deli partly owned by Jeff Zients, President Biden’s chief of staff. Dads discussed the NFL season; moms chased after toddlers.
But inevitably, discussion turned more somber, to Saturday’s incursion into Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, the deadliest day for Jews since the genocide perpetrated during the Holocaust by the Nazis.
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For the American-Jewish community in cities like Washington, New York and elsewhere, it was a bracing moment that reminded them that the legacy of antisemitism was as real as ever. The feeling was exacerbated for anyone who plunged into social media, where some supporters of Hamas shared gruesome images of the attack and some far-left Americans seemed to glory in the violence.
"It feels really heartbreaking and devastating to know that friends and relatives of friends are now going to sleep without a mother, without their children and (with) very uncertain days ahead,” a leader of San Diego's Jewish community said.
There are about 5.8 million Jews in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, or about 2.4% of the country’s adult population. And many of them have familial and cultural ties to Israel, itself a small country of 9.3 million people. The small size of the two groups and the close ties between American and Israeli Jews all but ensured that the attacks on southern Israel were deeply felt in the United States.
At least nine Americans are among the dead, and that number is sure to rise.
At the playdate in Washington, everyone knew someone: someone who had traveled through the region where Hamas terrorists broke through a border fence and began to slaughter civilians, or someone who had made aliyah —immigrated to Israel — and was now living in Tel Aviv.
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“I don’t have sufficient words to describe the horror of the past two days,” wrote Jewish Council for Public Affairs chief executive Amy Spitalnick in an organizational email. “To frantically reach out to friends and colleagues in Israel to make sure they’re OK. To read news of toddlers being kidnapped by terrorists (as I held my own toddler on my lap — truthfully, the first of a few times I lost it this weekend.)”
For the most part, younger American Jews tend to be more liberal than older Jews, for whom the horrors of the Holocaust and antisemitism were potentially lived experiences. But for the most part, American Jews support Israel, and many consider it at the core of their identity, even if they have never been there.
There are, of course, exceptions. At a rally in Times Square defending the Hamas attacks, some attendees bore signs indicating that they were Jews who supported Saturday's attack. To some progressive Jews, Israel is a colonizing nation, and violence against both its military and citizens is justified.
“The Israeli government may have just declared war, but its war on Palestinians started over 75 years ago,” said Jewish Voices for Peace, a group that opposes Israel, on X, the website formerly known as Twitter. “Israeli apartheid and occupation — and United States complicity in that oppression — are the source of all this violence.”
But such critiques tended to be the exception. Gatherings took place at synagogues across the country—even as many temples also had to beef up security in recognition that the threat from terrorism is higher today than it has been in years.
“It has been a devastating last few days,” read an email from Temple Micah in Washington, D.C., on Monday morning announcing an online prayer vigil. Similar rallies are being held across the country, including in New York. And the feeling of loss, so frequent in Jewish history, was met with a new resolve.
“We need to get closer together, have joy, tell the terrorists they won’t get us down," a New Jersey resident attending synagogue services said. "We will go on as Jews.”
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